Thought Experiment: Rear mounted 13B-REW...
 

Flame suit on so bring out the blow-torches...

Backstory:

Recently I made a trip back to my old home town to visit my brother whom I have not seen in years. He has made a name for himself in the moto racing circles and has his own shop now and has grown jaded with the sport.

On my visit I stopped by to use the lift and change my oil. Not really ever paying much attention to the RX he was pleasantly surprised after checking mine out. He told me how he had become tired of the same old thing and was looking to do something new. Not thinking anything of it the trip concluded and I went on my way. On the drive back (6hrs) I got to thinking about something fun we could collectively work on.

Remebering our past and how we used to build up sandrails and dune buggies a project idea struck me. Thus begins this thread....


Question:

So...considering that you can purchase a new engine fairly cheaply and he has the ability to fabricate just about anything I got to toying with this idea. How easy do you think it would be to rear mount a 13B-REW? Specifically finding a drivetrain that would work. On the old sandrails it was easy to use a volkswagon drivetrain/engine but obviously the current RX transmission will not work.

I am going to be doing some internet pokin, but figured I would also pose the question here to see what pops up.

Note this is probably going to be built street-legal just like the old sandrails so nothing uber-exotic if possible...

I don't see why not if it's going into a custom fabbed sandrail made to hold the 13b then why wouldn't it fit? The biggest hurdle is what you pointed out- a trany. You could use the RX-8 transmission but you would have to push the 13b all the way to the driver seat more than likely to make room for the transmission then a yoke to the rear differential.
I wonder if there are any mid-engine, rear-wheel drive transmission that take a 240mm flywheel. Then you have a good change of one working so long as your brother makes a custom adaptor hub or welds up the mounting bolt holes and then tap and die new ones.

I modified the question to fit. Yes I'm not too worried about the engine placement as much as how to get the power to the ground. Transmission is going to be the biggest problem.

Sorry for making it sound so general.

Good stuff...thanks...

I saw a video online of a turbocharged 20B on a tube frame buggy.... they were dynoing it. 600 or 700 hp. Scary stuff. Good way to die.

The DeLorean from the thread in general automotive uses a 20b mated to a porsche transmission. Porsche trannys are pretty popular for mid/rear-engine kit cars (lots of examples of chevy V8's strapped to them), so look into one of those.

Gotta go sometime! Haa haa...

But in all seriousness...It's definately not the idea. N/A renny should be more than enough on something that light. I mean we put a 1776cc VW setup in a rail once...that was stupid fast and next to unusable.

I'm more thinking along the lines of not making this a sandrail as the cooling/oil system alone would just be inviting disaster off-road. I'm seriously instead thinking about making something akin to a go cart that we could take to a track. Nothing professional or anything...just for fun.

We've done custom karts from the ground up in the past so this would fundamentally be a larger version haa haa.

He wanted to put in a moto engine...so we might do that ultimately but the question still stands out in my mind if this would be possible.

DOH! And I JUST saw that video recently too...DUH!

Thanks...

A few people have popped older 13B's into dune buggies and baja bugs. A little google searching can tease some of these projects out. (here's a 'volkswap' forum with a category for rotary swaps into VW's: http://bb.bbboy.net/vwengineconversions)

Re: the transaxle-- Kennedy engineered products makes an adaptor to mate a 12A or 13B with a VW transaxle... I'm not sure they've done a 13B-MSP swap yet, but it wouldn't surprise me if they've come up with something that could handle the torque and HP generated by the FD's engine http://www.kennedyeng.com/